I'm trying to figure out why one of my partitions is so full. Its a 50gb NTFS partition, and WinExplorer says its got 48gb on it (with 697mb available), which is impossible. I clicked on each folder, added up the folder sizes, and come up with about 35gb. This drive is also my PS scratch disk, and when I made a boo-boo in PS yesterday, it created a huge 17gb TEMP file, which was still showing on the drive in WinExplorer tonite. I deleted it, but the space has not been freed up. I've used various utilities to see if its still there in some hidden form, but nothing shows. I used a Norton clean disk utility to delete all temp and deleted files, then emptied the recycle bin (my 17gb temp file didn't seem to be in either anyway) and have run out of tricks. I'm convinced this 17gb temp file is still there somewhere, there is just no way I could have 50gb of data on that drive, especially since I moved about 6gb from that drive to another when it got over 40gb, knowing I wanted to keep some space available, then added up what IS there, and came up with about 35gb. I've refreshed and re-booted, nothing. Win XP Pro. Any suggestions?

I commonly use the file search tool to find large files, maybe 1 meg or 5 meg is a good place to start looking. The key being to use the adavnced options to search System, Hidden, and subfolders.

Also, if you want to manually 'explore' your disk and see these files, there is a setting under the "Tools" Menu -> Folder Options -> View Tab -> Show Hidden Files... and also uncheck the "Hide Protected Operating System Files".

Just please be aware that these options were there to help keep you from accidently messing up certain files so be cautious.

If you're using Nortion UnErase, which is part of SystemWorks, delete all protected files. When you right click the recycling bin, you should see an option to delete all protected files. This is separate from emptying the recycling bin.

Check your page file size; that could be taking up drive space. Show all hidden files as mentioned before. You should see the pagefile in the root directory of your system drive.

Also, do a chkdsk on all your partitions; you might have a corrupted filesystem. Instead of chkdsk; you can use Norton DiskDoctor with fix errors check marked. You might have to reboot your system.

A few ideas for you to try. The first is to do a disk cleanup. After that change your folder settings to show all files. Most likely your comp has a ton of hidden files that don't show up. If all of this still dosn't work, either compress you hd, which will slow things down, but give you some added space. The other thing is to get an external hard drive and store your images, mp3's and other miscellanous files there and just use your internal drive for programs and as a scratch disk. Hope this helps.

Thanks for all the replies, but I've already done everything you guys mentioned: deleted temp files, showing all hidden files (there are no system files on this drive), emptied trash, emptied Norton UnErase, ran chkdsk, etc. Its not a matter needing more room (I have literally hundreds of available GBs on three other internal drives on two machins, and a practically empty 400gb external), its trying to figure out why THIS drive is artifically "full" and won't release the space used by what I suspect was a 17gb temp file, that I did see in Win Explorer, and did delete manually, but that did not change the available space on the drive.

Oh, and to the MAC guy.... don't get me started. You don't want to hear about all the crap I'm reading from guys having "Tiger" trouble on some of the pro photo boards.

If your disk really is full and it is your boot disk, the next problem you are going to have is that you cannot extend the partition to free up space.

I ran into this exact problem on my laptop a couple weeks ago.

I had 1 gig left on my C drive, and 25 gig left on my D drive, but no way to extend the partition over.

I bought a program called "partition magic" from Norton, dumped everything off the D drive to a temp device, and with a few clicks of the mouse extended my C drive over into some of the free space on D, then reloaded my D drive information.....it was quick and painless.

You might have the problem that the main disc is so full that certain features won't run. For instance, you can't run a "defrag" command without a minimum amount of free space.

Maybe your "temp" file is so big, and the remaining space so small, that it is "jamming" you up somewhere in the process.

BTW, not all temp files show up or all deleted files will show up in your waste basket.

As for finding the lost file, you can run a search limiting the date to one 24 hours period and then scan the results to see if you can locate it and manually delete it.

Once in a while I save a doc but cant remember where I saved it and have had some luck using the explorer/search tool to find it.

Thanks for the thought, but if you read my posts more carefully you'll see it is not my main disk that's full, is actually a partition (created with Partition Magic) on a seconday drive. Your comment "BTW, not all temp files show up or all deleted files will show up in your waste basket." may be quite correct and this seems to be the problem. As I said, I did see the 17 gb file in the drive, and deleted it, and it doesn't show up anymore, but neither has the drive freed up the space, it still shows that same amount of available space (697mb) that it had before I deleted the huge file.